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Sometimes words don't matter

By Baker City Herald Editorial Board January 19, 2011 01:05 pm

The concept epitomized by the phrase “words have consequences” has gotten a lot of play in the media since six people were murdered and 14 others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, were hurt in a shooting spree in Tucson, Ariz., on Jan. 8.

Sadly, as is typical with such simplifications, relatively few commentators seem inclined to soberly evaluate whether the “words have consequences” charge, whatever its validity in general, contains even a scrap of relevance to the Tucson tragedy.

We say no, it doesn’t.

To answer otherwise we would have to believe that someone else’s words
or actions were a necessary ingredient — as vital as the pistol and the
cartridges inside its clip — in the shootings with which Jared Loughner
is charged.

Or, put another way, we would have to believe that if only someone —
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have been indicted most often
as conspirators — had refrained from making some particularly inciting
statements, then Loughner would not have pulled the trigger.

Yet, despite extensive evaluations of Loughner’s sometimes incoherent
ramblings, there is no credible evidence to suggest he was driven to
this heinous act, as if by some inexorable force, by the words or
actions of anybody.

Which means that nobody’s words or actions, save those of the man with the gun, is responsible for this slaughter.

This leads us to suspect that people who employ the “words have
consequences” slogan, or something analogous, in reference to the
Tucson murders are trying to score political points rather than
elucidate us with a sincere commentary on the nature and ramifications
of public discourse.

But wait, some pundits respond.

Even in the absence of an unimpeachable cause and effect relationship
between, say, Limbaugh’s radio rants, or Palin’s cross-haired
congressional maps, and these murders, that brand of caustic language
and imagery has so polluted political debate that the Arizona killings
were to be expected, indeed perhaps were inevitable.

This is merely the same baseless accusation, except the blanket of blame covers a bigger swath.

If there was no specific “call to arms” that put a gun in Loughner’s
hand, then it’s farcical to even imply that something less directly
influential — a “climate of hate” or some similarly amorphous notion —
set the madman into motion.

Looking beyond this single incident, however, the complaint that
mindless vitriol passes for political commentary is a valid one.
(Although this situation is as ancient as politics itself, not the
recent scourge that some people who haven’t studied history seem to
believe.)

We agree as well that much of the noise blaring from the fringes of the
political spectrum is the rhetorical equivalent of candy — rich in
empty calories and artificial additives but devoid of nutritional value.

Obviously it is impossible to say, with certainty, that such bellicose
commentary is incapable of exerting real influence on a person or a
group that ends up committing an atrocity.

In other words, yes, words sometimes do have consequences.

We would be pleased if the military jargon that has infested American
politics for so long was purged, if only because its use trivializes
actual warfare.

We’ve had our fill of states described as “battlegrounds” when no soldiers are fighting, or dying, there.

Still and all, the hyper-partisan cacophony in America seems to us more a nuisance than a danger.

These tunnel-vision blatherings can induce a sort of mental sclerosis,
to be sure, a condition which discourages people from tenaciously
dissecting an issue and then reaching a conclusion based on their own
examination.

Yet there’s a vast gulf — and for us an unbridgeable one — between
fretting about Americans’ dwindling aptitude for critical thinking, and
asserting that a radio or TV commentator’s words compelled Loughner to
fire bullets into a crowd of innocent people.

We understand that humans, having solved so many of the world’s vexing
mysteries over the centuries, feel compelled to to explain every
disaster, to affix blame whenever tragedy occurs.

But we ought to accept the reality that people, on rare occasions,
become in effect flesh-and-blood versions of volcanoes or earthquakes.
Their actions, though destructive and horrible, are the consequence not
of someone’s words or political machinations, but rather the product of
the maladies from which they suffer.

Beseeching Americans to forego the easy slur for the toil of
well-reasoned debate, as President Obama did so eloquently in his
speech in Arizona last week, is a reasonable request.

But in presenting our case as to why civility ought to prevail over
rancor, none of us should use as evidence crimes committed by a man
who, it seems, was the puppet only of his own diseased mind.